A smart home refers to a home environment where home devices including home appliances are connected together through a home network so that they can be remotely controlled anytime anywhere. To realize smart homes, various smart home devices have been developed in recent years and standardization efforts are under way in various areas including home platforms, wired/wireless home networks, intelligent information appliances, and green homes.
Referring to FIG. 1, a home appliance 101 operating in a smart home communicates with a user equipment 103 to exchange information needed for control (as indicated by indicia 107) and the user equipment 103 registers the home appliance 101 at an application processor (AP) 105 of a smart home service provider on the basis of the exchanged information (as indicated by indicia 109). After registration, the home appliance 101 can be controlled through the AP 105. Here, the home appliance 101 may communicate with the user equipment 103 in Soft AP mode or Wi-Fi P2P mode. The communication mode of the home appliance 101 may be determined according to capabilities thereof. To communicate with the home appliance 101, the user equipment 103 makes a connection attempt according to the communication mode used by the home appliance 101. This procedure for home appliance registration may be referred to as easy setup. Such easy setup may be used to attach and register a home appliance to the home network in a rapid manner with minimal user intervention.
During easy setup, to connect to a home appliance to be registered, the user equipment may have to receive information on the communication mode of the home appliance from the user. However, as it is not easy for the user to know the communication mode used by the home appliance, the user may be inconvenienced by registration of the home appliance.
For example, Soft AP mode and Wi-Fi P2P mode are different in terms of procedures, messages, and information elements used for registration. Hence, when the communication mode of a home appliance is not known or wrong communication mode is selected at the time of registration, it may be difficult to connect the home appliance to the user equipment.
As such, it is necessary to develop a method that enables the user equipment to detect the communication mode of a home appliance, to connect to the home appliance for communication, and to register the home appliance at the AP without excessive user intervention.